“Hey, the Prime Minsiter of Sweden is on the way to meet you.”
“Hey, the Prime Minsiter of Sweden is on the way to meet you.”
That text is still living in my head. Genuinely one of the most surreal hours of this whole trip.
Day one of the official NATO Summit was the Defence Industry Forum, so the room was full of the companies that build a lot of what NATO runs on, alongside the government officials who work with them. I’m not here to tell you private defense contractors are the good guys, but I was glad to be in the room to ask them things directly instead of reading about it later. We got to ask questions about war profiteering and industry monopolies straight to the executives and actually got real answers instead of just talking points.
We were also front row for President Zelenskyy speaking, and heard several other heads of state up close in a way that didn’t feel like the usual roped-off press distance.
It’s amazing, NATO treats us like press. We don’t get paid for this content, and nobody signs off on it before it goes up. They’ve been upfront that a free press is paramount, and that includes all of us as content creators.
That’s how I ended up filming one-on-one with Sweden’s Prime Minister, Ulf Kristersson. His team found out a group of creators was on site and made time to meet with a few of us, and his staff even recognized me from stuff I’d posted before, which was wild. I asked him directly about Sweden’s recent openness to hosting nuclear weapons on its soil in wartime, his answer was candid, and the video already has half a million views.
I’m one of 27 creators from around the world invited to be here, and I don’t take that lightly. This isn’t about us asking better questions than journalists. It’s that our audiences are young people who’d never sit through a NATO press conference but will absolutely watch a 60-second video of what actually happened in that room. Getting to bring people in who normally never see this side of things is the whole reason I’m grateful to be here.
